Archive

During the Microsoft Management Summit last month, I had an interesting chat with Rakesh Malhotra who is the VP product of Apprenda. It made me to think more about two important technologies: virtualization and PaaS. As we know, virtualization is almost a must for IaaS. Will it be the same case for PaaS?

1. Virtualization war will be heated between VMware and Microsoft. The trigger will be the Hyper-V 3.0 which is expected to ship in the middle of 2012 with the Windows 8 server. According to many people, the 3.0 release will bring it on par or better than latest VMware hypervisor. Read more...

While 2011 is coming soon, many technologists and medias are busy with predictions for 2011. I got an email from the chief of Cloud Computing Journal Jeremy Geelan (@jg21) for my predictions. Here are my thoughts on the cloud computing for 2011 and beyond: Read more...

The focus of cloud computing will gradually shift from IaaS to PaaS which becomes key differentiator in competition. Developer enablement becomes more important than ever in ecosystem evangelism, full software lifecycle integration, IDE support, API and framework, and etc.

Many more mergers and acquisitions (M&As) will take place in cloud space for companies to build stronger cloud portfolio. For big players, it should include dual vertically complete stacks both as services and products. Whoever gets there first will gain enormous advantages over its competitors.

Provide an easy way to provision new infrastructure and application services for a computing cloud

Category

Behavioral

Problem

To run a large-scale computing infrastructure, you will need many different types of services, including compute, storage, and networking, among others. After virtualization has successfully detached compute from the physical hardware, it’s very easy to provision and scale compute. But compute requires storage and networking which are lagging behind. To maximize the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing, it’s natural to push the storage and networking in the same direction.

Looking beyond the infrastructure to consider applications, we need various types of services such as database, directory, messaging, and more. I’ve covered the App VM pattern that allows using IaaS for PaaS in a previous blog. While you can pack some of these services into an application VM, the problem is that it scales well but does not follow the aspectual centralization pattern.

We all know the three different types of cloud services from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), PaaS, to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). If you want to leverage PaaS, you have to choose one of the PaaS service providers like Google or Microsoft. Leveraging an external PaaS has its own benefits.

What if you want to keep your applications running in-house but still enjoy the benefits of PaaS? Today you don’t have much choice. Google, for example, does not sell its App Engine as a product that you can install and run on premise. You have to run it on the Google cloud.

If you think Google is a superman and doesn’t need anyone, think twice. Yesterday in its Google I/O developer conference, it announced its Google App Engine for business. The notable features include centralized administration, a 99.9% uptime SLA and heightened security. It also announced the partnership with VMware on cloud portability.

Why does Google need VMware?

In short, it’s about Enterprise. As the “for business” in the name explains, the new service is targeted for enterprises which are not really Google’s strength. Read more...

Most people who are interested in VMworld already know the public voting for the proposal is now open till 26th. If you would like to hear about specific topics, it’s high time to cast your votes.

For each track, all the presentation proposals are listed together in one page. To quickly locate a particular proposal, you can use find feature of your browser. Once you login, I would suggest to browse all the proposals and vote for those you find useful. Casting a vote is just two mouse clicks: one for voting and the other to close the confirmation message box. Read more...

Today VMware and Salesforce.com announced vmforce.com finally after several weeks of speculations on what the joint project is about. The following diagram I captured from the live webcast of the event answered the question nicely.

The event attracted about 3,500 online viewers, not to mention the audience onsite. This was a very successful event, resulted in more media coverage than anyone can read. If you missed the live webcast, you can check out the recorded one from the website.

Among all the blogs and news coverage, I think you should read the one by Steve Herrod who has done a great job in explaining the joint adventure in a big picture. His blog also has links to other bloggers.

Looking beyond the exciting keynotes and demos, I think the key takeaways from the announcement are as follows: Read more...

VMware has also made a number of open-source contributions to the Cloud Tools project, which powers the SpringSource Cloud Foundry service, enabling Java developers to deploy, test, and manage applications for VMware environments via VMware vSphere(TM) and the VMware vCloud API. Read more...

NEED HELP?

My company has created products like vSearch ("Super vCenter"), vijavaNG APIs, EAM APIs, ICE tool. We also help clients with virtualization and cloud computing on customized development, training. Should you, or someone you know, need these products and services, please feel free to contact me: steve __AT__ doublecloud.org.

Me: Steve Jin, VMware vExpert who authored the VMware VI and vSphere SDK by Prentice Hall, and created the de factor open source vSphere Java API while working at VMware engineering. Companies like Cisco, EMC, NetApp, HP, Dell, VMware, are among the users of the API and other tools I developed for their products, internal IT orchestration, and test automation.